Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 688 posts

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#81

Post by xyst »

corytheboyd wrote: post #75

Hey CDC, I’ll build your website for half that price. By myself. And it will work. Just uh, hit me up haha It’s insane how far those unfamiliar with software will take the mythical man month. Nonono throwing money and people at your problem is absolutely not guaranteed to solve it better. My offer is of course a joke, well unless they want to talk specifics and I agree it’s reasonable to take on myself. Or just plain…

are you also going to answer the phone calls and e-mails of thousands (potentially millions) of technology illiterate users?

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#82

Post by singingfish »

OK, so the fundamental problem with health IT is a greater problem in the commercial software industry as a whole. The buyer tends not to be the person who uses the software, and the more bureaucratic/ technocratic the process you use to get to the end user the more likely you are to not meet their needs. Put crudely and inaccurately, the procurement team end up going with the consultants who do a good game of golf.

Add government and a big consulting firm like Deloitte in health IT, and you'll be ready for a world of pain. Here [0] is a good paper on the topic.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22188347/

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#83

Post by sillysaurusx »

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote: post #63
sillysaurusx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that just sounds like regular big company codebases. I see no difference. At Scottrade, I was horrified to find a 5k or 10k line Date C++ class. They'd copy paste functions to handle each leap year individually. The function names themselves contained the specific year. They also yelled at me for downloading the source code to `touch`. It was nice to get to see the crazy side of software. Everyone was deadpan ser…

Well surely there were tests...

Nope! They solved it the opposite way. Their bug tracking system consisted of individual customers who called up to report bugs. I.e. Joe Blow would call up and say "Hey, I'm supposed to see 231 shares, but I only see 219 shares."

That would result in a bug report. The bug report was that Joe Blow saw that outcome. In other words, the bug report didn't contain anything about the code itself.

They had an entire division of support people whose job was to track these bugs, and to fix them.

In order to fix the bug, they would manually edit the database, or do whatever was necessary to make sure Joe Blow saw the right value again. But they never changed the code; they weren't programmers.

Once Joe Blow was happy, they closed the bug report as "fixed."

Therefore, no tests were ever required.

It was ... impressive? I think? I couldn't mentally process what I was seeing at the time. But "impressive" is probably the right word. After all, the system worked.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#85

Post by bbeesley »

NearAP wrote: post #53
didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

This is not a 'software engineering' thing. If you look at it from a software development POV, then the issue is more of not having 'product managers' whose job it is to - understand the requirements, write the specs, basically champion the POV of the end user (after actually identifying the correct end user). Examples a) The article talked about the software not working on Internet Explorer (IE). Older people still…

Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users.

That said, building something that works well on mobile (re your point b) but also works on internet explorer is a pretty tough ask. No reason you couldn’t build a basic bitches version of the site that works on old devices, then route traffic these based on user agent.

Idk, points a through c are basically already solved problems. I’d be disappointed to see problems like that if I was spending $20,000 let alone millions. Issue d though does feel like the sort of thing that you didn’t know was on the horizon up front, would be a pretty major rebuild to add in later on.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#86

Post by 1986 »

tidepod12 wrote: post #46
didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing busine…

Yeah, but if it got done in time but works so poorly that no one is using it, does that model actually work for anything other than being able to say "we got it done"?

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#87

Post by uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #30
ndiscussion wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my money. Not a company's. To anyone who disagrees, how is this statement wrong?

It’s 0.00275% of the income tax paid annually ($44M/$1.6T)and an even smaller amount of the total tax. Assuming you’re an average taxpayer, it cost you about thirty one cents ($44M/143M people). If you’re a median taxpayer it’s even less. This is a giant fuck up, but way out of perspective. Even with all the other fuckups, the wasted portion of your taxes surely isn’t enough for heads to roll.

'Tis but a drop of a mere barrel of waste. Begone, trifling muckrake.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#88

Post by Pasorrijer »

johnthuss wrote: post #54

My favorite part was this quote: “It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome.” As if that is a serious problem.

Also a problem if you're working with airlines, medium to large companies over 15 years old, the government, etc. Etc. Comments like these are why the people who have to interface with actual customers get so mad with development teams.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#89

Post by maxerickson »

tidepod12 wrote: post #46
didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing busine…

Can't we throw away the information implied by the contract that resulted in something worthless?

(I'm not taking the dismissive 'this is easy' side of the argument here, but the project failed, the lessons learned need to start there, not with the terms of the contract)

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#90

Post by ndiscussion »

mewse wrote: post #37
throwawayboise wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't we speak figuratively anymore? Why is Deloitte getting all the blame here? Why is the government not responsible for this fiasco? They know very well what Deloitte is and what their track record is.

> Why can't we speak figuratively anymore? Because it’s less than a month since people stormed the US capital, literally erecting a guillotine and literally calling for politicians they disliked to be hanged. How is this hard for you to understand? If you want to speak figuratively, then maybe don’t do it using exactly the same speech that other people are demonstrably using and acting upon literally. EDIT: “gallows”…

It's okay, the gallows was obviously fake as well. Loving the political downvotes btw, does this gallows, made with 2x4's, look like it would hold a body?

https://www.ourquadcities.com/news/national-news/capitol-mob...

I don't mean to offend, I don't mean to say that whoever is downvoting is unintelligent, but it clearly won't hold.

Post reply on HN